Walmart workers hustle to prep for Helotes opening

By Natalie Chandler, and Lauri Gray Eaton, Staff Writers

Updated 11:58 am, Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Photo: Lauri Gray Eaton / Northwest Weekly

Image 1of/2

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 2

Jason Parsons, 27, maintainance associate, pores over a Walmart store map as he helps prepare the Helotes site for its April 10 opening. It's his first job, he says, and, as a college student, he says, the company does "really well working with a college schedule."

Jason Parsons, 27, maintainance associate, pores over a Walmart store map as he helps prepare the Helotes site for its April 10 opening. It's his first job, he says, and, as a college student, he says, the

Walmart employees Aggie Rosas and Rudy Avila stock the automotive department shelves as they prepare for the April 10 opening of a new Walmart in Helotes.

Walmart employees Aggie Rosas and Rudy Avila stock the automotive department shelves as they prepare for the April 10 opening of a new Walmart in Helotes.

Photo: Lauri Gray Eaton / Northwest Wee

Walmart workers hustle to prep for Helotes opening

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

Helotes is welcoming Walmart this spring, nearly 10 years after the company pulled out of the city amid controversy.

Scores of workers like Aggie Rosas, a 24-year employee of Walmart who transferred from the SeaWorld-area store, began stocking the shelves on this past week at the 152,000-square-foot Walmart supercenter near Bandera and Leslie roads. Company officials offered an advance tour.

The newly built store presented a cavernous and alien landscape with nearly 3.5 acres of empty shelving and workers weaving between intermittent mountains of cardboard boxes, occasionally stopping to peruse enormous, laminated store maps to determine what products went where.

As Rosas and co-worker Rudy Avila, an oil-change service writer, loaded empty shelves with carton after carton of flashlights, batteries, air fresheners and other automotive accoutrements, she described her more than two decades with the mega-store company as a largely enjoyable experience. She started with a job in receiving, which eventually led to her current title as manager of the tire and lube-express department.

Most Popular

“It doesn't seem that long, really,” since she first went to work on Evers Road at the San Antonio area's first Walmart, she said. That was where she would bring her kids for store-sponsored fundraiser events when the children were still in strollers. “My baby is 20 now,” Rosas said.

“It's like a family,” she said of her Walmart co-workers. “We see each other every day.”

With the advent of Walmart in Helotes, the store will see an influx of 300 jobs in the area.

It is 27-year-old college student Jason Parsons' first job. “They do really well working with a college schedule,” the maintenance associate said.

For Walmart, the schedule is coming down to a matter of weeks before its April 10 introduction into Helotes.

“With major construction complete, we are headed into the home stretch for our grand opening,” store manager Stewart Adair said. “We are proud of our new store and look forward to welcoming members of the community to come visit us.”

The continuing bustle at the store is the most noise yet over a project that quietly moved through City Hall in 2011.

That year, many residents became aware of Walmart's plans after City Council agreed to some of the company's requests to soften restrictions on lighting and signage.

As a result, the supercenter will have more signs than the city usually allows. Store representatives said the signs are needed to alert shoppers to where the pharmacy, grocery and outdoor-living retail areas are located.

Council also allowed Walmart taller signs but denied the company's request to use uplighting on some of them.

The supercenter will be smaller than typical and feature less signage, more trees and architecture compatible with Helotes, city leaders said.

Only a half-dozen residents gave their opinions at that meeting. That's a reversal from several years ago, when police were called in to monitor the controversy over a Walmart proposed for Bandera and Scenic Loop roads.

The company eventually abandoned that plan as protests over the site escalated into a legal battle.

Some Helotes leaders credit the current lack of contention to the new site's location in the heart of the city's business district.

The former site is near the mostly undeveloped city of Grey Forest.

Those opposed to the former project allege there hasn't been much chance to make their voices heard about the present site.

“The only opportunity was to comment on sign and lighting variances,” said Ron Green, a local hydrologist who cited flooding concerns at the current location.

“All decisions made behind closed doors and off the record,” he said. “On the rezoning, they did not mention Walmart or any other big box stores, they just said it was to encourage business.

“The next thing you know, Walmart is coming in and they're asking for size of signs and heights of lights.”